Žižek Studies

In the Beginning  … 

Paul initially tried to develop the journal on his own, leveraging that DIY ethos that was the subject of his early work in hacker culture. He began by designing a website banner and basic page layout but quickly realized that he was completely out of his comfort zone and knowledge base. He turned straight away to David Gunkel an unusual breed of academic—someone steeped in Theory (more about the use of the capital T shortly) and also highly competent in all things web-based. David, as always, had too much on his plate to start running a new journal but perhaps a clue as to the reason why he allowed himself to be inveigled into the project was contained within his succinct response to Paul’s early blue and yellow themed design efforts—“It looks like the banner for a Swedish porn site.” Suitably chastened, Paul then enrolled the help of a design-literate friend, Terry Speake, who came up with both the IJŽS logo—something we called “the slot-top Z”—and colour scheme, which David then brought alive as a functioning website.

From the very start of the journal, David was very clear that we should use a Creative Commons license which meant that 1) journal content would be open access and freely available to all readers across the globe and 2) the intellectual property (IP) of published material would remain in the control of the original authors with the stipulation that any and all subsequent usage acknowledged IJŽS as the original site of publication. This particular approach to open access content chimed fully with Paul’s appreciation of the innate accessibility of the IJBS and his perennial frustration with the supine acquiescence of the academic profession to a profoundly iniquitous system of journal publication and draconian control over intellectual property. In academic book publishing, the original authors receive a very small percentage of the net profits, but at least a discrete physical piece of property is produced with relatively low profit margins or, in the case of a university press, as a non-profit operation.

This model of content creation and distribution is a product of the exigencies of print technology. Although the technology has changed, the model has remains in place and largely unquestioned. In fact, the situation has not improved very much in the 10+ years since IJŽS began publication. Though IJŽS was part of what could (in retrospect) be called the academic “avant garde” in 2006, today the “online journal” is pretty much de rigour in academic publishing. Most academic journals from the big names in the business (and it is big business)—like Sage, Springer, Routledge, Elsevier, Emerald, etc.—are now online journals. As such, they employ and exploit many of the innovations pioneered by IJBS, IJŽS, and other early adopters: online review and processing of submissions, web-based distribution of content, “just in time” publication providing access to content prior to or in the process of issues being fully assembled and populated, fully searchable journal data bases and articles, etc. Today these features seem entirely natural to and a necessary aspect of any academic journal. But in 2006, when IJŽS was just starting out, it was revolutionary and untested. At that time, “serious” academic journals needed to be on paper, because (as many of our colleagues had argued at the time) “you can’t trust anything on the Internet.” There was also a widespread and rather curious criticism heard from both colleagues and publishers alike, that the electronic nature of an online journal meant that one could not read in the bathtub, as if reading academic publications was something that was routinely performed during personal grooming and bathing.

So what the one hand giveth, the other taketh away. Commercial academic journals have caught up to innovations in digital technology and are following the lead of IJŽS (and other journals like it), moving to online submission, review, and distribution of content. But they have doubled down on monetizing their product. They still charge users for access to standard content (i.e. $29 USD for a one time use of a single article) and require that authors assign to the publisher all interests in and rights to the submitted content. But they now offer an open access option. This option is pay-to-play, where authors can retain IP rights over their material if and only if they (or their institution) provide up-front payment in the form of an APF. For this reason, the continued existence of a journal like IJŽS is important, because it provides, as it always has, practical counter-measures to commercialized forms of academic publishing.

A Man with Qualities—Žižek the Public Intellectual

The fact that Žižek stands out so forcefully in the current intellectual climate is partly due to his own uniquely charismatic qualities, but also because of the parlous commodified and bureaucratized state of today’s university sector which provides the bleak background from which he stands out. Today, the idea of the university bears more than a passing resemblance to Siegfried Kracauer’s account of “the idea” becoming merely “an ostentatious façade” honoured more in the breach than the observance: “The group that has gained power certainly does not abandon the idea, even though it has in fact deserted the idea and is now just floating along in reality … Its relations to the contents of should-being that once constituted it are in truth now only of a superficial sort, the idea having become pure decoration, an ostentatious façade for a partly rotten interior which represents, together with this façade, a unity that is nothing short of a mockery of spirit” (Kracauer 1995, 167). Intellectually curious academics now frequently find themselves in a situation akin to that of a devout Catholic at the time of the Borgias, struggling to find space to say the rosary in the midst of a papal orgy.

Žižek thus succeeds where universities routinely fail in terms of public engagement partially because of his infectious enthusiasm for all things theoretical (even when the audience may not fully understand the esoteric content) and partly because, fully understood or not, that theory often serves to shed light upon some of the most pressing issues of our time. Žižek is not the most prepossessing of speakers, he lisps and he could be said to be sartorially challenged, yet his intellectual charisma provides audiences and readers with something they are sorely lacking. Whilst Western mainstream media failed to predict and then failed to understand phenomena like Donald Trump’s election in the US and the success of the Brexit referendum in the UK (and all too often lazily lump the two very distinct events together), the way in which Žižek blends ideological analysis with psychoanalytical insight serves to provide a much needed corrective to the media’s bromides and tired old formats.

Within academia, at least one of the reasons Žižek is often viewed as persona non grata is because of his ribald humour and lewd jokes. This is not a surprising outcome given the often po-faced and precious climate that pervades contemporary academic discourse. But such knee-jerk dismissals of Žižek’s humorous method miss its substantive significance as memorably pointed out by Todd McGowan in the inaugural issue of IJŽS: “Without seriousness, theory becomes nothing but the bad conscience of the ruling ideology. It offers questions but never approaches truth. Only a serious theory can permit us to recognize the truth that we are living without being aware of it. Only in theoretical seriousness does the possibility exist for us to give up the quest for a truth based on knowledge and to embrace a truth of non-knowledge that structures our being. But first we must recognize that the path to seriousness is strewn with jokes” (McGowan 2007). Although Žižek rarely makes explicit reference to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, his critique of institutionalized forms of seriousness and the willingness to take a risk on what is ludic—even to the point of playing the role of “philosophical fool”—follows the spirit, if not the letter, of what Nietzsche called Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft or The Gay Science.

Screening Thought

The media establishment is, ironically, perhaps one of the last unexplored regions of our communications-saturated age. Despite our society now being one of extreme transparency (in the UK, for example, Channel 4 airs the program Naked Attraction in which nubile people select a date from a range of unclothed contestants) rarely does one expose the manufacturers of consent or comment upon the commentariat. Because of the way Žižek looks and sounds—add to that the radical nature of what he says—his audience and reader are provided with a corrective lens with which to view contemporary events and crucially the various structures that determine how those events are perceived and processed.